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Value-Add: Marketing After a Deal
PERFORMANCE REVIEW // Value-Add
Prioritize Marketing After the Deal Is Done
CARL WHITE
Founder, MarketVisory Group
Imagine that you’ve been hired by a private equity firm—we’ll call it PE Capital—to run a portfolio of four podiatry practices that PE Capital recently acquired. In total, there are 10 offices, eight podiatrists and multiple staff spread across your metro area. Each has a decent-sized patient panel with room for more. PE Capital told you they see potential in the practices to grow their patient panels; add higher value treatments; serve as a platform to buy more practices; and achieve cost synergies across the operations.
Marketing is integral to realizing the first three areas and can participate in the fourth. Unfortunately, many PE buyers and operating executives don’t prioritize marketing after the deal is done. Instead, each office keeps doing what it’s doing, which is what got their panels to decent-sized but not bigger. The sooner you put marketing high on your list, the faster PE Capital will realize its vision.
So, where do you start? Build and run a marketing plan common to all offices and tailored where needed. Here’s what that looks like.
Marketing Strategy
It’s common to see similar offices doing different marketing activities without a good reason. That’s what you find as you start to tour the offices. You’ve inherited a bunch of tactics. Strategy corrects that—it always comes before tactics.
The four essential elements of a marketing strategy are: • TARGET PATIENT TYPES. Who are your patients? It’s not enough to say “people with foot and ankle
problems.” Do they share commonalities of age?
Disease state? Activity level? • YOUR CORE DIFFERENCE. Why is your new entity valuable and different to those target patients? “We have experienced podiatrists” isn’t enough. They’re table stakes. Are you offering broader treatment variety? Is your organization easier to deal with than competitors? • PATIENT LOYALTY. You want patients to be loyal, but that doesn’t happen on its own. What content and activities can you create to build loyalty? • TACTICS AND CHANNELS. Which tactics and channels—website, paid promotions, social, email,
PR, etc.—will you use to bring your content and activities to life?
Implementation Plan
Now that you have a marketing strategy, it’s time to get it done. Often, marketing tactics are inconsistent. That never achieves results, and it wastes time and money. To be effective, marketing needs traction, which takes time and a religious devotion to consistency.
Here are the core components for consistent and successful implementation: • A MARKETING CALENDAR. Create a marketing calendar for each office that shows what’s getting done and when. Build your calendars at a high level for the year. Each month, review the next rolling three months while refining your plan for the current month. • ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES. Designate an owner for each tactic in each office. If you don’t, the tactic won’t get done. • MEASUREMENT. Evaluate whether the tactics are working. Are new patient calls and form fills coming in? If not, why not? • COMMUNICATION. Ensure everyone is on the same page. Do the doctors and staff know what the strategy is and what their responsibilities are for tactics? Can they communicate to you openly when they need to? • HIPAA COMPLIANCE. Marketing and patient privacy overlap. Make sure the tools you use and people you assign to execute the marketing plan are HIPAA compliant per your HIPAA policies.
A Common Plan—with Room to Customize
PE Capital should create a single plan for all of its practices, with room to tailor the plan to each office when needed. They’re all podiatry practices, so PE Capital’s vision to grow patient panels and add higher value treatments can likely be implemented in similar ways across offices. Plus, it’s easier to understand and work through one plan vs. multiple.
It’s also more efficient. With a common set of tools, there are fewer to learn. Take the example of getting more patient reviews. You probably inherited different tools across offices for managing reviews. Instead, pick the best one and use it everywhere. That way, everyone learns the same tool, and it ultimately saves money. For subscription-based tools, subscribing to one tool for 10 offices usually comes with a volume discount. Then, once you’ve worked out the kinks, PE Capital will have a “marketing playbook” to use when they acquire more practices.
So how should you decide which parts of the plan to standardize and which to tailor?
STANDARDIZED: Patient types will be similar across offices, so the core difference that sets you apart needs to be the same across the organization. It’s the essence of your brand (i.e., the promise you make to patients), which should never waver across locations. There will be overlap in how you build patient loyalty and the channels you use.
Similarly, each office’s marketing calendar needs to look and work the same way. Use the same tactical tools and measure results for each tactic the same way.
TAILORED: One example where the plan can be tailored is sponsorship of local organizations, since the offices are in different communities. When tailoring other parts of the plan, use your judgment. Pressure-test tailoring something first: Does X really need to be different in this office from what we do in the other offices? If yes, do it, measure it and change it if you need to.
We follow this playbook when we work with clients— marketing strategy religiously implemented. When you start a new assignment, you won’t know what you’ve inherited. Follow this approach and you’ll catch up. You’ll install an effective marketing plan that everyone can understand and implement. Most importantly, PE Capital’s vision will be on the road to reality. //
CARL WHITE is the founder of MarketVisory Group, a healthcare marketing agency. White has over 20 years of experience doing marketing in healthcare. For much of his career, he worked at Baxter and Hollister. He started MarketVisory Group five years ago to broaden his reach and help a wider variety of doctors, clinicians and patients. White is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant. He lives in Chicagoland.
SIX ESSENTIALS FOR DRIVING A SUCCESSFUL MERGER & ACQUISITION INTEGRATION
Bryan Graiff
Partner, Armanino LLP
Amy Julian
Consulting Director, Armanino LLP
With increased merger and acquisition (M&A) competition and higher transaction prices, it’s more important than ever to conduct appropriate due diligence and assemble a strong integration strategy. Before embarking on a transaction, utilize insights from benchmark industry data to ensure your chosen subniche has the best opportunity for yielding the highest return on your investment. After identifying your target, consider implementing these tips as you manage your M&A integration.
1. Conduct pre-deal due diligence.
Conducting robust due diligence is critical to ensuring the buyer fully understands their purchase. This phase can save dollars but also uncover issues that can lead to a completely different acquisition outcome. The due diligence process should include a quality of earnings review, tax diligence and structuring, IT and risk assessment, as well as a thorough predictive leadership assessment of the management team in place to assess their ability to successfully scale and grow under a new ownership structure.
2. Establish a clear integration strategy that is aligned with the M&A rationale – before the deal closes.
Integration blueprints are driven by the rationale and strategic intent of the acquisition or merger. A rigorous plan can increase the speed and success of the merger or acquisition. Setting guiding principles for the integration plan to determine which items to integrate and which to keep separate ensures the buyer keeps the objective of the deal at the forefront.
3. Hire or appoint a strong integration leader. 4. Clearly outline roles and responsibilities for integration planning and execution.
The cross-functional integration team is responsible for delivering cultural, organizational and operational alignment across the companies while achieving calculated cost synergies. It is important that everyone understands their respective roles and responsibilities to successfully navigate a merger with high expectations and tight timelines.
5. Don’t underestimate change management and communication efforts.
Uniting disparate cultures is often among the top challenges during an integration. For a successful unification, culture must be viewed as core to the business. This is accomplished by business leaders visibly prioritizing cultural integration across all levels and locations of the newly combined company. Each business function should have an assigned sponsor that owns an implementation plan with specific, consistent metrics.
6. Drive cross-functional integration and digital transformation.
To achieve maximum value, ensure enough attention is given to all functions in an organization during the integration, including commercial, operations and back-office functions. Investing in technology solutions to bring realtime data insights and create operational scalability can improve cashflow optimization and help maximize EBITDA.
BRYAN GRAIFF leads the transaction advisory practice and private equity industry group at Armanino. AMY JULIAN is a director in strategy & transformation at Armanino with experience driving M&A integrations from strategy to execution.
A strong integration leader is one that can quickly mobilize teams to support the combining of two organizations across all business units. This requires obtaining a high level of trust and commitment and demonstrating effective communication, problem-solving, organizational and motivational skills. This leader should establish the governance bodies and decision rights at the beginning of a post-close integration to quickly achieve planned synergies.
